Organisation and naming conventions

This post is part a rant and part an 'I told you so...' feeling from all those years at uni.
Since we work mainly on digital files in the industry something to be expected is to create a high number of files, groups and folders and sometimes more than one project at the time.
Collaboration between peers is common practice and for as much as you like or dislike a project you're working on, it's never right to receive a file where you have to spend twice the amount of time trying to figure it out or fixing someone else's laziness.



This is one of the first files I ever got when I started working... Call it OCD, but this dove me up the wall. It made the project instantly look more complicated and time consuming than it actually was. Point taken, some project require quick modelling and texturing like this case, therefore is understanding not having the time to clean it up entirely, but grouping and naming some of those groups can make a huge difference.









I must admit that I never used to be organised, and it was only after I started working on groups and after bad headaches that I realised the importance of it. I might not be an expert on it, yet there are loads of tips online that will make everyone's life easier:

Use self-descriptive names
The rule of thumb  is that you can identify what's inside the file. 'File1' or even 'bigboss' doesn't give much away while putting something like 'final_boss_lvl_01' can be more helpful. This is is a good practice not only for the file names, but for the PSD layers, groups of objects in Maya, etc.

Enforce the rules
If you know that the naming is important and you know what things have to/want to be named as, tell the others. It's not good to assume that they will know what you think/want without telling them so. This helps a lot in the general communication as when corrections or feedback comes in place everyone can name things the same way and immediately spot problem.

Archive for the future
Sometimes there's the need to come back to old files and rework something. If everything is named properly this task will be a lot easier. Once things are ready to move on, make sure to put files organised in date order, and in the case of several versions of the same file, always make sure to state which one is the official/final one.

At the end of the day, it becomes a good habit in no time, it saves you time overall and makes communication easier.